#username: By the late 2000s I was deciding it was probably a better idea to have a less-personally-recogniseable than more-personally-recogniseable handle, at least for some purposes.
There's always the question "what to choose". I'm something of a fan of "Forbidden Planet", and a run-together form of "Dr. Edward Morbius" produced "dredmorbius", which seemed suitably 1337. So I began using it.
When G+ made clear it was trying to create an "identity network", it was time to scrub Old Me.
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One of those was a cat wearing glasses with an alternating set of astronomy images. It grew on me with time, and eventually I swapped out the animation for my own inserted image (the Crab Nebula, /not/ the Cat's Eye, as that didn't appear as well within the glasses).
Some time later I researched and wrote up a bit on G+ user activity numbers, as best I could tell. Wanting to note caveates and conflicts of interests, I noted I was a space alien cat of questionable pedigree.
The Business Insider reporter who covered the story included that disclaimer, verbatim, in his account. I ... was rather amused.
(The thing about having other people quote you is ... you're really never quite sure what they'll use.)
I've started using the expression generally when I'm in a situation where others are questioning my qualifications or authority -- I'll note "hey, I'm just a space alien cat" -- which is to say, /I claim no authority or qualifications/. Instead ...
... what I say speaks for itself. I'll provide background, references, data sources, methods, etc. (as I did on the G+ user numbers story -- and was really impressed when an SEO/Marketing firm actually followed through /and replicated my findings on a 10x larger sample/).
But yeah, that's the origin story.
Oh, and the avatar is something I ginned up in Inkscape based off the Reddit Snoo and some modifications. "dreddit" is "Dredmorbius's Reddit" (though that's ... not actually the name of my subreddit, long story), with the red 'd' matching the styling of the subreddit itself.
So I started using "Dr. Edward Morbius" as my online persona across a number of services. Some distancing from my personal and professional world, an identity that could be used to explore concepts, views, discussions, etc.
G+ also presented any number of UI/UX frustrations, one of which was an /absolutely massive/ Hero profile shot ... which took up half /or more/ of the screen, regardless of zooming down. I ... started looking for annoying things to put there. Mostly gifs.
#username
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